Engaging Adoption of DevOps

Executive mandate does not immediately translate into a change in behavior. Organizations inherently grasp the value of embracing DevOps, but the timing of exactly when it begins and is completed is another matter. The devil truly is in the details—or rather, in the ability and willingness of the organization to adopt a change in thinking and a change in the actions that follow.

“Adoption” is then a common term to describe the measurement of how far along an organization is in its transition between legacy and future, between the beginning and the completion of embracing DevOps services. As you might guess, adoption does not happen overnight, nor does it occur because of mandate or willingness. These factors influence the speed of adoption in some cases, but can act as deterrent in others. Adoption—like most other services provided to a given organization—occurs because its value proposition is sufficiently defined and resources are budgeted and assigned to it.

The level of resources you dedicate to tracking and facilitating adoption of DevOps in your organization is directly proportionate to the complexity of your development efforts. If for example, you have a new development team well-versed in cloud technologies and comfortable with using software-as-a-service (SaaS) tooling with only few applications under development (small app portfolio), your proportionate adoption efforts will be small, and transition should occur very quickly. However, if you have a large number of applications spread out across a wide variety of hardware platforms and are using a wide variety of development languages or tools, your proportionate adoption efforts will be far more substantial to keep the timeline manageable. In either example, a complete lack of attention to adoption results in elongating the timeline two to eight times longer than it would have been if formally engaging adoption was considered.

Adoption Engagement 101

So what do these adoption/engagement resources do from day to day? The primary focus of the folks assigned to this duty breaks down into three major categories of work efforts:

Communications conduit: The first responsibility of the folks on this team is to develop and implement a communications plan to keep all stakeholders up to date on what is going on with DevOps services. This includes metrics-based information such as how many applications have been fully onboarded to DevOps. It also may include how many applications have been onboarded into a particular level of automation within the stack, from code to OS. A company may want to know how many apps have gotten their database efforts automated, as an example, or perhaps how many apps are fully automated with middleware messaging systems. But the communications also must include keeping executives up to date on the ROI progress, and what areas of the company may be exhibiting resistance (for both legitimate and non-legitimate reasons). Expressing these outcomes can be sensitive and should be done with a modicum of care, so the folks assigned should have these skills to start with.

Information Preparation & Follow-Up: When a given application in the portfolio is targeted for onboarding to DevOps, a significant amount of information is usually gathered about it. While a company can create an automated system for development engineers to provide the data into an electronic web page or other means, very often questions arise about “how” to respond. You do not want to have your DevOps services engineers constantly deterred from their work to answer basic questions such as this, so having an adoption team able to provide the data quickly facilitates the overall goals. In addition, often the development engineers are too “busy” to provide the DevOps team the data they need. Again, someone needs to follow-up to ensure questions are actually answered. While it is easy to assume engineers will behave professionally and respond accordingly, that assumption in the real world results in long delays and interrupted workflows across multiple teams.

Training & Feature Expansions: Finally, the tools and architecture practices behind them need to be communicated effectively to the practitioners and participants of the DevOps services. When new programmers are hired, for example, they should have access to training materials on accessing to the DevOps toolsets and using base functionality, what governance procedures will impact them and more. On occasion, to facilitate adoption, an application executive sponsor and his or her immediate direct report engineering team leads will request a demonstration of a given DevOps tool or function. The adoption team should handle these requests and not divert a production DevOps engineer from his or her duties. And when a DevOps tool is updated or upgraded, the adoption team should develop the method to communicate the new ability, edit the existing documentation and ensure every practitioner is notified about the new features and how to use them.

Adoption Engagement Financials

Deciding how many people to dedicate to this function is a mix of your development environment complexity and what you have currently to complete your DevOps rollout efforts. If you want a 24×7 rollout, then you will need staffing levels to accommodate three shifts, seven days a week, with additional folks for vacations, holidays and sick leave. If you are only rolling out a 9-to-5, five-days-per-week effort, staffing numbers drop significantly. Resources, then, can be organized as one per line of business or one resource for every 50 applications in the portfolio (higher ratios are supportable). Whether you align the resources to the services you provide or to the customer audiences you support won’t matter nearly as much as having at least some resources dedicated to these efforts. As I stated earlier, a complete lack of resources dedicated to this function results in greatly extending the timelines for adoption of DevOps; worst case, in the failure of the transition entirely.

This kind of function is inherently considered overhead. Most DevOps leaders (generally emerging from an engineering background) naturally don’t consider this more administrative function as necessary. It doesn’t strictly add to the engineering capability or skills of the main onboarding teams, so they simply do not include it or divert budget to more “necessary” folks during planning. Organizations that don’t actually provide a guided DevOps service—that is, they simply install the tools and tell the developers to have at it—find their adoption efforts lagging quite a bit as well. The early adopters jump right on without coaxing, but the folks too busy with their own efforts to “try something new” never seem to get around to it. Finally, the guys who think, “Since it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” will never adopt. Even in this kind of tooling-only services deployment, dedicated adoption resources would have resolved these issues in a far more timely manner. The overhead may be painful, but the alternative is far more painful. Once a company or division experiences a failed DevOps rollout, it rarely returns to try again, and the overall costs could be doubled or worse.

For organizations with the vision and perseverance to employ dedicated resources to facilitate adoption, the converse of the problems outlined above becomes the norm. Developer teams have the information they need to understand their own need and, more importantly, the benefits of adopting DevOps. The work relations between DevOps service provider and DevOps service consumer become highly efficient and mutually beneficial. The entire organization benefits from effective communications from the executive sponsors at the top to the engineering practitioners at the bottom. Execs know the costs, the progress, what is new and how it will help them reduce costs or speed up delivery. Practitioners know how to use the tooling, why it will help them and how to stay current on the changes that come along (and they invariably do). Practitioners appreciate being current on a given tool or skill set; this provides a way to do just that.

Impacts to the Bottom Line

Discreetly measuring the ROI for the application of adoption/engagement resources is a bit squishy. As a general estimation, take the timeline of the DevOps rollout you originally planned and multiply that by two to three. The cost of that delay in timeline (plus the risk of complete failure) is the cost delta to measure against hiring a few more folks (or allocating them from lesser-used areas already on staff). Usually the cost of failure far outweighs the benefits of expanding the overhead support teams as needed. In addition, the cost of a failed communication effort can grow over time. At the outset or launch of DevOps, the communications, whether in document or oral forms, will be fully up to date. But over time, as vendors add new features and new versions of the tooling emerge, practitioners won’t know how to take advantage of the new capabilities. Since many of these new features enhance speed or accuracy, the tendency to not use them—or use the inconsistently for lack of knowledge—will add up.

I find the resistance to the idea of adoption or engagement resources often is founded in the notion that engineers are plenty smart enough to figure this stuff out on their own and they will naturally gravitate to it, as ultimately it makes their lives easier and better. Yes, the engineers are smart enough and some will. However, engineers often build their own “ecosystems” of how an application should be built (which few others could understand or improve upon). They often are reluctant to tear this down in favor of corporately implemented templates (that everyone could understand and improve). They fear the loss of unique skills the company must depend upon. They fear the loss of being “special” and needed. Even though DevOps standardization makes builds and deployments consistent, reduces trouble tickets and improves quality and speed—which ultimately translates into fewer 2 a.m. phone calls for engineers to come fix—they are still reluctant to change (just like the rest of us). Having dedicated resources to help them through the value of this, and assure them of their continuing value in a differing area (the code we want them to write), can make a world of difference and ensure a transition does occur.

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